Sonny

I made this kinetic typography for a scene from 'The Life Aqautic with Steve Zissou' which is one of my favourite independent movies and Bill Murray is one of my favourite actors.



It took a surprisingly long time which is funny because this is a research brief but still I do quite like it.
It is a lot better than my last attempt and it has taught me a lot more about using the program and about laying out type and stuff and I think it is quite good overall.

I guess this is kind of like visually researching how the original subject matter can inspire creativity.

The sun is a good star

Greek Mythology Family Tree

This is a considerably better family tree than the last one I posted because it has a good key and its all well labelled and stuff.
Thanks go to Sir Jack Neville, Baron of Brighton for finding this for me.

Click the image to make it bigger or see the real page here:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1jthf4/ludios.org/greekgods/

Different kinds of stars

Magnetic Star

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11011118

The Age of Gods

Greek Mythology is effectively a big collection of narratives featuring characters and deities and was the basis of a religion in ancient Greece.

It is told through stories and poems and art forms like mosaics and painted pottery.

It is assumed that the ancient Greek culture had these narratives for pretty much everything to make sure that there were no loose ends.

In Greek mythology, linear history can be split into 4 separate times or eras:

1. The Age of Gods
2. The Age of Gods and Mortals
3. The Age of Heroes
4. The Trojan War

The Age of Gods:

Before there were any gods or anything at all there was this big void state of nothingness known as Chaos.

Out of the Chaos at some time emerged Gaia (The personification of the Earth) and some other important deities: Eros (or Love), The Abyss (Otherwise known as Tartarus; A deity and a place even lower than the Underworld which is really bad) and Erebus (The personification of darkness and shadow) with no real explanation of how they came into existence.

Somehow Gaia had an immaculate kind of conception and gave birth to Ouranos (Uranus; The sky) and they became lovers. Incest appears to be a recurring theme in Mythology but they are gods so they can probably do whatever they want.

When Ouranos fertilized Gala, she gave birth to the Titans.

The Titans consisted of 6 boys and 6 girls accordingly:

Coeus, Crius, Cronus, Hyperion, Lapetus and Oceanas were the boys and Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Rhea, Theia, Themis and Tethys were the girls.

After these births, Gaia and Ouranos decided that no more Titans would be conceived.

After the Titans came the Cyclopes (One eyed giant guys) and the Hekatonkheires (“Hundred-Handed Ones” which are literally giants with 100 hands and 50 heads and almost as powerful as the Titans) were born.

Cronus was the youngest and apparently most terrible of the Titans and decided to overthrow his father Ouranos by castrating him and throwing his genitals into the sea which we know was how Aphrodite was born.

Cronus then became the ruler of all the gods with his sister Rhea as his wife.

Cronus had a weird thing about his children as he assumed that they might try to overthrow as he did to his own dad, so each time Rhea gave birth, Cronus would snatch up the child and eat them. They had six children altogether; Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera and Zeus.

Rhea started to get annoyed about Cronus eating her children (I don’t blame her) so when Zeus was born she hid him and placed a stone in a baby’s blanket which Cronus mistook for the new born baby and ate, leaving Zeus alive and well.

When Zeus was fully grown and powerful, he fed Cronus a poisoned potion of something which made him vomit up the children that he ate and the stone which had all just been sitting in his stomach apparently undamaged.

Cronus sent the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires to Tartarus for some reason (I think he just didn’t like them) and Zeus freed them. To repay the favour they gave Zeus his Lightning bolts, Hades his Mask of Invisibility and Poseidon his Trident and altogether they challenged Cronus for the throne and overthrew his power, condemning the Titans to imprisonment in Tartarus.

Interestingly after all this strife, Zeus had the exact same paranoia and decided to eat his first wife Metis before she could give birth. Unfortunately for Zeus, Metis was already pregnant with Athena and together they apparently made Zeus miserable from inside his own body until one day Athena burst from his head fully grown and dressed.

After defeating the Titans there were more gods and goddesses born and raised and a pantheon was created to reside atop Mount Olympus. This was the home of the Gods.

Zeus was a bit of promiscuous and fathered a lot of Gods and heroes.

He also fathered the 9 Muses through Mnemosyne (The Goddess and personification of Memory):

Calliope (Epic Poetry)

Clio (History)

Erato (Love Poetry)

Euterpe (Music)

Melpomene (Tragedy)

Polyhymnia (Hymns)

Terpsichore (Dance)

Thalia (Comedy)

Urania (Astronomy)

His other children are the Gods Athena, twins Apollo and Artemis, Hermes, Persephone and Dionysus and he fathered the heroes Perseus and Heracles. He was also the father of Helen (Helen of Troy) and the great king Minos of Crete. He also had Ares (God of war), Hebe and Hephaestus with his Sister-Goddess Hera.

There are a bunch of other stories that would take far too long to write out completely as each god has a background and features in loads of other narratives.

The basic pantheon consists of 12 gods on Mount Olympus, otherwise known as the Dodekatheon. They are Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Dionysus, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus and Hermes.

There are about 450 individual gods and deities in the ancient Greek mythology not including deified mortals. 

You can see a list of probably every God or Deity from Ancient Greek Mythology on this Wikipedia page with most of the references properly cited:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_characters

I also found this quite confusing family tree but it seems accurate enough:

Monkeys Revisited

Now that I may be focussing on Manta Rays, I think I should pick something other than Monkeys to do my research on because they could be very similar and I haven't done much monkey research yet anyway.

I made this brainstorm to see how I could research something else within monkeys but then decided to choose a different topic all together and made some ideas for other topics at the bottom left.

I decided to choose Stars as one of my topics because I am really interested in space and stuff but stars are specific and everyone likes stars. Stars must be good.
I have also chosen Telephones. Not like mobile phones, I mean real cool old fashioned land line telephones. They are definitely good.

So I have finally decided on my 5 topics:

1. The Ocean/ Manta Rays
2. Gods
3. Independent Cinema
4. Stars
5. Telephones

Manta rays are good

There are Manta rays in this new advert from Cadburys.

I also made this drawing of manta rays:

Manta rays can jump

I found this newspaper clipping which supports some of my earlier research about manta rays jumping out of the water sometimes although it is still really unknown why they do this.
Some people think it is part of a mating ritual and others think it is used just to get the parasitic fish off their bodies.

The sea specifically

I did this brainstorm to try and narrow down my research about the sea. I am considering focussing specifically on manta rays as they have been a big part of my sea research so far.

The only problem with that is that Monkeys are another of my topics and having 2 animals is quite similar and will probably have a lot of overlapping research about conservation and endagerment and stuff so I may have to change the Monkeys topic to a different one.

Fishies

An article about some unfortunate fish.

Sea Stones

Here are some stones that I collected from the sea in Cyprus.
There were billions of other stones but these are the ones that caught my eye. 

And here are some different styles of observational drawing of the rocks.

Kourion

Kourion is this ancient Cypriot archealogical site near the southern coast which houses a load of different ruins including houses and a large marketplace and baths but it is most iconic for its amphitheatre which was used for theatrical performances and gladiator arena battles.
I went there and took a load of photos which I made into a panoramic shot using photoshop just like we were taught in a mac suite session.

Click to enlarge

The city as a whole is thought to go back as far as 1300 BC which was quite a long time ago. 

Cyprus is a Greek founded country (Although the north side is now owned by Turkey) and as such has a lot of ancient history surrounding the country and a LOT to do with the ancient Greek Gods. 

The most worshipped Greek god of the country is actualy a Goddess called Aphrodite who was the greek goddess of love and beauty and sexuality and her Roman equivalent is Venus. She is said to have been born in Cyprus near Paphos. 

Well actually the story goes that she emerged from the sea after Cronus (One of the original Titans and father of Zeus, Hades and Poseidon) ripped off his dad(Uranus, the father of all the original Titans)'s genitals and threw them into the sea. I don't think he liked his dad that much.

She is a very important goddess in Greek Mythology.

Some Cypriot monkeys

I went to a bird and animal park in Cyprus and saw some monkeys.
Here they are.

and I found this picture on my computer.

And it reminded me of an article I read about Elephants that can draw pictures.

The elephants seem to paint pictures of specific things like flowers in the example above and some can actually clearly paint elephants (implying that elephants are consious of their own and others bodies and shapes and can replicate them on paper in an artistic manner) like this example below:

The article was related to whether or not the animal can actually paint the picture which of course it can as you can see in the video. However, it is not so much the elephant that paints the picture as the Mahut (trainer) who guides the elephant.
Renowned biologist professor Richard Dawkins travelled to Thailand to witness the act itself and found that the Mahut uses a series of tugs on the ear of the animal to direct the strokes.
As an example, pulling the ear left would mean paint towards the left of the page and pulling up would mean to paint upwards on the page (Those probably aren't the real commands but its the general idea).
You'll notice that in the above video the Mahut stands on our blind side of the animal to force the crowd to concentrate on the animal and not on him.
Each elephant also paints the same picture over and over again and does it every day so it learns the picture over time as well.

Even though the elephant recieves help in painting the picture and is handed the brush as it cannot pick it up, it is still a really impressive skill and shows the accurate prehensibility of the elephants trunk.

I guess the important thing to note here is that the elphant is not showing any artistic talent or flare, it is just reproducing something that it does not understand.
The article went on to explain that although the elephant shows no real artistic imagination or creativity, there was an example of a Chimpanzee which did.
I can't remember the story exactly and can't find the article again but I think that the chimp was taught to use a paintbrush (If not then it was crayons or something) and was gradually taught to draw or paint simple shapes.
This seems obvious enough, but after a while the chimp was actually able to create its own patterns and shapes and genuinely seemed to be capable of creativity and imagination when it came to art.

Which of course links back to the picture of the little monkey with a pencil.

But it also reminds me of a short bit that I read in this book.

Its one of those strange books that is barely a book. It had some really interesting points to make but it was all a bit too 'self help' and a couple of the things that it said were a bit stupid.
One thing that did stick was about knowledge.
I can't remember it exactly, but it was basically making a note of the fact that we are an intelligent race of people and there is a lot of potential knowledge out there in the world and that as a whole we generally strive for knowledge and actively seek to gain more.
The problem is that knowing why and how isn't always a good thing. In fact sometimes it kind of ruins our innocence or removes the mysticism.

Like when you see a magic trick and you are amazed and impressed.
If you find out how the trick is done, then you aren't amazed or impressed any more.
The magic is gone.

Another good example is watching a football match.
If you knew the score when it started then you probably wouldn't watch it.
It isn't knowing how it will end that makes it entertaining, it is not knowing.

The fact that I know that the elephant can't really recognise itself and paint a self portrait is kind of like finding out how a magic trick is done.
I think I would probably be happier if I just took it for granted and thought that the elephants were really clever and talented.

I guess ignorance can be bliss.

The sea is good but it still broke my camera.

Although some might argue that it was partly my fault for swimming with it in my pocket.